Are you passionate about Cisco’s networking technology? You know, routing, switching, mobility and more? Run for routers? Swoon over 11ac? Named your turtle Captain Catalyst? Do you love sharing your knowledge? Do you want unique access to Cisco experts? Today is your lucky day my friend!

I’m excited to announce the call for nominations for the all-new Cisco Champions for Enterprise Networks!

From now until January 10, 2014, please nominate yourself, a friend, a mentor, a luminary in the community or your favorite awesome person for inclusion in this program.

Submit your nomination today to cisco_champions@external.cisco.com! Be sure to mention “Enterprise Networks” in your nomination, so it will be routed correctly. All Cisco Champions for Enterprise Networks will be selected and alerted no later than January 17, 2013.

As we approach the end of 2013, I feel it is important to reflect on what an important year it has been for Cisco in mobility. 2013 marked continued growth in the WLAN space overall. It’s exciting to to see the continued gain in market share. Innovation has been a key differentiation against our competitors, and we will continue to strive towards providing the best solutions for our customers’ current and future needs. I truly believe the preservation of our market growth is attributed to the cutting-edge solutions that only Cisco can offer to meet the increasingly complex challenges of mobility in the enterprise, BYOD and beyond.

As the rapidly developing mobility and cloud markets transform the technology landscape, the population of mobile workers looking to extend the boundaries of their offices continues to grow. They want to connect, communicate and collaborate seamlessly, and their organizations are seeking user-friendly, mobile-centric collaboration tools that enable teams to work faster while being as productive as possible.

Today, I am pleased to announce Cisco’s acquisition of Collaborate.com to help capture this market transition in mobility and cloud. Collaborate’s skilled team of cloud and mobile software developers has created a mobile collaboration application that provides unified document sharing, task management and team communication capabilities, enabling today’s mobile workforce to collaborate with team members on projects. Workers can instantly create virtual collaboration rooms where they can chat and share documents, notes, photos and videos.

Collaborate’s platform integrates with email and third party cloud services to make collaborating efficiently with others while on-the-go that much easier. Collaborate’s flexibility also enables teams to integrate collaboration and communication into their enterprise workstreams, as the application helps keep teams aligned and accelerates decision-making.

Cisco’s acquisition of Collaborate supports our goal of driving market leadership in Collaboration. Together, Cisco and Collaborate plan to provide a comprehensive solution that enables the mobile workforce to work smarter and more efficiently from virtually anywhere. Collaborate’s cutting-edge technology and strong engineers as part of Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group will help accelerate Cisco’s innovation in Collaboration.

With deep experience building innovative mobile-centric collaboration experiences, we are excited about the new opportunities the addition of Collaborate and its talented group of individuals will provide to Cisco. The Collaborate team will enhance our ability to deliver industry-leading solutions and unique value to our customers.

A thief on the loose you say, at Cisco Systems, in San Jose? Turns out he was invited. Apollo Robbins was one of the headliners for Cisco SecCon in San Jose during the first week of December. Mr. Robbins taught us an important lesson about security: seeing is not always believing. Apollo demonstrated the art of “social engineering” using techniques he perfected working on a pickpocket show in Las Vegas. Apollo taught us to expand our thinking, to look behind the curtain of what motivates people. This helped us to better understand the trust people put in each other and in our products. Bruce Schneier was the second headliner, and spoke to us about the idea of trust. Bruce’s talk was not heavily focused on technology, but instead approached trust from the human perspective. He answered questions such as why people trust, and how trust is passed amongst groups of people. This is beneficial because Cisco strives to be trustworthy to our customers, corporately, as individuals, and with our products.

SecCon is our annual internal security conference where the security community at Cisco gathers together to network and learn. 2013 represented SecCon’s sixth year. Our goal is to strengthen the security community and employee knowledge of how to build products that are more secure. This experience is not limited to those in San Jose. SecCon links remote sites such as Research Triangle Park (Raleigh), NC and Boxborough, MA with the speakers in San Jose. The remote sites also host local speakers, all in the name of growing the security community at Cisco.

A Cisco Executive kicked off each morning. SVP Chris Young provided an overview of our security product strategy and spoke of the new technologies incorporated into Cisco from Sourcefire. SVP John Stewart continued his impassioned plea for engineers at Cisco to be “all in” with our approach to product security and Cisco Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL) adoption. Cisco VP Sumeet Arora spoke of how his organization is adopting Cisco SDL and how everyone must be trained in awareness of product security. One specific quote from Sumeet is, “Cisco SDL is like brushing your teeth.” That stuck with me, as a member of the core Cisco SDL team at Cisco. Cisco SDL is expected as a part of our daily routine. From all of the executive keynotes, a few messages were clear: Cisco SDL is mandatory for Cisco products, and product security awareness is a key driver for our success. We launched our product security awareness program last year at SecCon, and we saw it grow exponentially this year. This awareness program is so popular that it received plugs from each keynote as well as many times during the employee talks.

In the fifty talks given by employees, we were shown methods that some teams have used to build security in to their products. We saw reverse engineering displays and examples of historic vulnerabilities in Cisco products, all so that the people gathered can learn about the problems of the past. This builds a solid foundation for us, as a community, to minimize these problems in the future.

SecCon 2013 offered eleven security-based, bootcamp-style training classes that employees had an opportunity to attend. These classes are “boot camps” because they are in depth and demanding. The classes include lecture, but primarily each student works through interactive exercises and applies the security knowledge as they learn.

The boot camp courses were divided into three high-level categories: fundamentals of product security, hacking, and network defense. The fundamentals of product security lay a foundation for our engineers in some basic topics of security, including secure coding in C / C++, IPv6, and web application security testing. The hacking category included a basic course on the tools and techniques of hackers, understanding and hacking secure protocols, reverse engineering, and mobile application hacking. Network defense taught our students to properly configure and monitor networks. This category included “Network Threat Defense, Countermeasures, and Controls” and “Advanced IPv6 Security with Pen Testing”.

This year was another great conference. You only had to listen to the quality of any talk to gain an appreciation for the depth of security knowledge and talent that exists within Cisco. With this base, we all learned that trust is so important to Cisco. Trust is the foundation of how our customers perceive Cisco and our products. It was clear through each of the presentations that trust is something that we must constantly earn. After this SecCon experience, I am even more aware of Cisco’s commitment to continue to strive to be the trustworthy IT vendor, working hard to identify and defend again the “thief” be they inside or outside our domain.

We are all witnessing the continued proliferation of mobile devices on our networks. This device explosion has led to an increase in wireless service discovery and announcements protocols like Bonjour, DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance), and UPnP (Universal Plug and Play). For example, Bonjour locates devices such as printers, other computers, and the services that those devices offer on a local network using multicast Domain Name System (mDNS) service records. Bonjour is built-in with Apple’s operating system including iOS and available on Windows as a common plugin while DLNA and UPnP are built in with Android and Windows operating system respectively.

The usage of these protocols comes with a big price: an increase in Multicast traffic because they are all inherently sent as a broadcast transmissions in Wi-Fi networks.

But why is an increase in Multicast traffic bad for users?

The answer is simple: multicast traffic increases mobile device battery consumption by forcing the device host processor to wake-up more often than required.

Have you ever wondered a drop in battery percentage while your mobile device is sitting idle of hours in your pocket? If yes, then you are probably on a network with a high percentage of multicast traffic emanating from every mobile device that is part of it.

So how can we save battery drop taxes on our mobile device without losing the ability to support these protocols? Read More »

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